Posted by marvin from l316t2p34.netway.at (195.96.17.34)on March 19, 1998 at 05:42:20:
After digging into texture mapping for both 3dfx and Rendition,
I am beginning to admire the 3dfx architecture and design.
Until now I had an uneductated picture of the 3dfx as a
simple and very fast design, reduced to the most useful
primitives and recklessly optimized for fillrate, and that
these features made it a winner.
My revised picture is that it has a remarkably complex
architecture, is highly specialized and is made up of
extremely complex circuitry (mostly speaking of the
texel units here). The modularity of the texel units is
a nice and clever (and twisted?) design feature. Hardware
per-pixel mipmapping with mip-map dithering, etc... is
surely not easy to implement...This makes me wonder how 3dfx
managed to become a mainstream product - usually (and
unfortunately), in both soft- and hardware, not the most
sophisticated and most specialized solutions wins, but the
more simple and mediocre one will do (speaking of MS, for
example...). In this reason, I think each and every dollar
3dfx earns with Voodoo2 is well-earned. It's specialized
hardware design somehow reminds me of the old Amiga days,
having played much with Blitter and Copper (or should I say
Denise, Paula and Agnes?), always admiring how many clever
tricks some guys could find out....
(I am still not sure how important per-pixel mipmapping really is,
though...)
On the other hand, as I can judge from my limited knowledge,
the Rendition philosophy is remarkable, too. The idea of
a versatile, reprogrammable RISC core is a really nice
feature (the whole Rendition concept seems somewhat 'British'
to me, if you know what I mean - I can't really explain...)
However, to fully exploit this feature, it needs
development resources, more than Rendition obviously had till
today: it's a pity that they could not really grow during the last
years.... One of the strongest features of Rendition is their
superior handling of asynchroneous processing and their
superior DMA usage - features that pay the most reward if
game design is adjusted for it. Unfortunately not many games
are optmized for Rendition until now... So again, this chip
has great potentials, but these potentials would only be
unleashed if Rendition really becomes a/the mainstream
development platform (with RRedline games).... Let's hope
for the best, then...
Of course, all these opinions are based on the perspective
of my half-educated, half-informed, subjective point of view.
Not to be misunderstood: I am not a Voodoo fan, and I always
favoured Rendition (perhaps mostly because I am always
sceptic about mainstream solutions/products...? and because
I could not stand the whole crowd of voodoo-idiots posting
all and everywhere their brain-shit (sorry)). I am just
wondering how such a complex, highly specialized product
could win at all, and I have the felling that I am getting
into a more fair point of view/judgement through my 'studies'
into both system architectures.
I am strongly interested in other opinions on this topic....
marvin